2025.04
Houston, TX

Adobe Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign

Dustjacket, Cover design for Sim Kern’s speculative fiction novel GENOCIDE BAD: NOTES ON PALESTINE, JEWISH HISTORY, AND COLLECTIVE LIBERATION from Interlink Books.

The dust jacket leads with confrontation and intent. A saturated orange Pantone floods the surface, turning the book into an immediate visual alert. Across it, tightly cropped diagrams of bombs, missiles, and military hardware are printed in a vibrant blue, borrowing the visual language of technical schematics. The effect underscores the central premise: genocide is not incidental—it is engineered. The embossed title GENOCIDE BAD dominates the composition, scaled to overwhelm the format. Set in a slightly translucent white with a spot UV overlay, it asserts itself with a stark, declarative force, aided by the full-stop it ends with. 

Beneath the dust jacket, the coverwrap adopts a colder, more procedural tone. It reads like a blueprint sheet—arsenal diagrams laid out methodically on a single vivid blue Pantone. The only interruption is the spine, where the title, author name, and publisher logo are hot stamped in orange foil.

The material treatment reinforces the concept’s cohesion: orange sprayed edges and matching endpapers visually merge with the dust jacket, extending the field of color into the body of the book. The object becomes unified and deliberate—mirroring the unsettling idea at its core: that such violence is not chaotic, but designed.